The Sociocracy Group

Management & governance that works for everyone

We are a global sociocratic organisation with certified consultants, trainers and facilitators offering services to a wide array of clients around the world. We envision a world where people can live together as unequal and equivalent individuals, organisations and societies.

Since the 1970s our sociocratic experts have created, and now maintain and develop a body of good practice of sociocratic governance, organising and engineering.

As summarized in our Vision, Mission, and Aim statement, we want to spread the Sociocratic Circle organization Method (SCM), because by using the sociocratic design and construction rules we stimulate good governance and the development of the Me (individual), the We, (organisations and communities, including Me) and The (environment, processes, including We).

TSG uses a sociocratic business model. The business owns itself and the participants are entrepreneurs with both a common enterprise and their own enterprise linked together under a cooperation agreement. Together they are responsible for the development of the body of knowledge and good practice of SCM. As entrepreneurs in their own businesses they use SCM in their field of practice.

History

Before Endenburg

The word Sociocracy was coined by Auguste Comte in the early 1800s to describe rule by all members of a social group, using scientific principles. In the 1940s, anti-Nazi activist Kees Boeke claimed the word, and began to apply it in his school, called Werkplaats Kindergemeenschap (Workplac Children community).

1950s – 1970s

Gerard Endenburg attended Boeke’s school, and went on to work as an applied cyberneticist, designing electronics (including some of the circuits still used in headphones today). In the early 1970s, he inherited his family’s manufacturing firm, Endenburg Electrotechniek. After seeing the problems of traditional management approaches, Gerard began to work with his teams to develop a new approach, combining Boeke’s version of Sociocracy with his training in cybernetics. The result was a new system of management and governance.

1980s – 1990s

Gerard Endenburg founded the Sociocratisch Centrum, a Dutch training and consultancy charged with spreading Sociocracy and continuing to develop the core system and to research best practice. Annewiek Reijmer came on to manage the Centrum, and over the 1980s and 1990s hundreds of organizations in the Netherlands and around the world adopted Sociocracy. Toward the end of the 1990s, the first non-Dutch sociocratic consultants were certified.

2000s

In the 2000s, leading Canadian, American, and German consultants launched new divisions of the Sociocratisch Centrum, bringing their personal consulting firms together as divisions of the global Sociocracy Group. Books on Sociocracy were published in English and French. A global movement of all kind of Sociocracy users grew under different names.

Today

Since 2010, Gerard Endenburg has founded TSG, for the manintenance, development and application of the Sociocracy Norms as the gold standard of governance, used by TSG certified experts for all kind of organisations looking for effective governance frameworks compatible with their disciplines.